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Twitter reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta hours after it launched its rival app Threads. Elon Musk's personal lawyer Alex Spiro accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who had access to the company's "trade secrets and other highly confidential information."
"With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta's copycat 'Threads' app with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta's competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter," Spiro wrote.
Meta denied the claims in a post on Threads.
"To be clear: No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that's just not a thing," Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote.
Interest in Threads surged shortly after its launch, with more than 30 million people downloading the app during its first day.
"Wow, 30 million sign ups as of this morning. Feels like the beginning of something special, but we've got a lot of work ahead to build out the app," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads.